Starting report

January 13th, 2014

Brief Report of Webdam Advisory Board

The Webdam Advisory Board met during the Webdam Workshop on Brainstorming on Foundations of Web Data Management. (See the notes and slides of the meeting).
Two members of the Board could not come to the meeting: Rick Hull and Moshe Vardi.

The meeting was very interesting and highlighted both the challenges of Web data management and the recent contributions of Webdam. For the challenges, several discussions turned around the richness of the information in this context: semantics, imprecision, time and provenance, etc. This makes it difficult to have a unifying model and encourages the book editing work on the topic that has been initiated in Webdam.

The results obtained so far in the project are interesting and fundamental. We believe that the Webdam project is on track in spite of a somewhat slow start that was due to a personnel-hiring difficulty: finding very talented people for temporary positions is not easy. This however has been recently resolved and we believe that the new people joining in this fall will bring the project up to speed. In general, we encourage the Webdam researchers to continue along the lines of research they started. In particular, the existing collaborations with other projects such as FoX and Search Computing (SeCo) is very fruitful and we encourage its continuation.